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(This is a guest post by Deb McAlister, who is working on a book about business/personal legal issues and social media. This appeared on her Distributed Marketing blog.)

Who owns your LinkedIn profile? (Hint: it might not be you.)

That was the headline on a post on this blog back in June, 2011 — and the answer that I arrived at with help from a number of legal and compliance experts was, “It depends.”

That wasn’t a particularly satisfying answer for me personally. I had one of the original 5,000 LinkedIn accounts while it was still in beta, and I have only a small number of contacts because I make it a point to limit my contacts to people I know personally — people I’ve worked with (or for), people I know from face-to-face interactions.

The idea that an employer might someday claim that my contacts belonged to them was more than a little unsettling. Now, a court in England has issued an order that requires an employee who resigned to start his own consulting business to turn over all of his LinkedIn contacts to his former employer – along with receipts and contracts proving that none of them became clients of his new firm.

That clarifies one legal issue in the U.K. at least: the contacts on your LinkedIn profile are more likely to belong to your employer than they are to you if those contacts are customers, employees, or vendors you did business with in your job.

According to press reports, this is the first time a British court has ordered an employee to turn over all LinkedIn contacts to an employer.

It “highlights the tension between businesses encouraging employees to use social networking websites for work but then claiming that the contacts remain confidential information at the end of their employment,” according to the Telegraph newspaper.

While it’s unclear exactly what transpired between an employer and employee based on press reports, one thing is clear: both employers and employees need to start considering ownership of social media contacts. Paying attention to the documents you sign when you are hired – or reviewing them after the fact if need be – is becoming more important for all employees.

Marketing employees who manage corporate social media sites and accounts during their employment may find that their social media accounts are especially vulnerable according to employment attorney Donna Ballman. Ms. Ballman wrote recently that employers may have a claim regardless of what documents you signed.

“If you were hired to be the company blogger, to create a Twitter account and tweet for the company, to develop the corporate media presence, the work you did while you were employed and those social media accounts you got for the company likely belong to the employer. An exception is probably LinkedIn. They don’t allow profiles for companies – only individual. Your LinkedIn profile is probably yours, even if the company told you to create it while on the job. Just don’t run afoul of your nonsolicitation or noncompete agreement,” she says.

Note that Ms. Ballman says that the profile is probably yours — the question of who owns the contacts is being hotly discussed (on LinkedIn, of course), and it’s unclear if U.S. courts will follow the British courts on this issue. Just a year ago, in another case involving a head hunter who went out on her own only to be sued by her former employer (who happened to be her uncle) for approaching candidates and clients who were her LinkedIn contacts — and also part of his database. The Eastern District Court of New York state took the opposite stance from the UK court, ruling in Sasqua Group, Inc. v. Courtney that the availability of information in social media invalidated the company’s argument that the information was a trade secret. (It also proves that if you hire a relative, make sure that you get them to sign the standard noncompete agreements.)